Episode 1 of the Planet Local Voices series II:

Living Alternatives, Active Hope with Laura Kaestele

Drawing on a wealth of practical experience from regenerative community building, Laura Kaestele, discusses the importance of living models of localization in keeping alive a sense of active hope and radical imagination for a more beautiful, just and nourishing world.

She calls attention to a 'mycelial network' of such alternatives, all over the world, which remains invisible in the mainstream world, but which is clearly gaining strength. Laura Kaestele works as a network weaver with ECOLISE, and has worked as designer, grower, project manager, and facilitator for the permaculture and ecovillage networks for nearly two decades.

This video forms part of the Planet Local Voices II series, produced by Local Futures, an international non-profit organisation, dedicated to renewing ecological and social well-being by strengthening communities and local economies. Explore our work here.

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We close the Bristol Conversations series with the much-admired teacher, poet and post-activist, Bayo Akomolafe. A public intellectual and writer, Bayo blurs the lines between the personal and the political, prompting a deep rethink of how we can act for change. He is the founder and curator of the Emergence Network and Chief Host of the We Will Dance with Mountains community. He’s involved with many other projects, some of which you will hear about in this episode.

In this conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge, Bayo reflects on the ruptures in modernity that have sparked his own questioning. Going beyond a politics which fetishizes identity and category, he invites us to open up other spaces of power – where the immediate, the understated, and the local are more profound and more promising than grand slogans and ideas.

Dr. Lyla June Johnston is an indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné Navajo, Cheyenne and European lineages. She blends her study of human ecology, graduate work in indigenous pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her research has focused on the ways in which pre-colonial indigenous nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems.

In this conversation, Helena and Lyla weave together different lines of heritage and experience, getting into deep discussions about identity, psychology and culture. They focus a lot on European identities and salvaging them from cruel and inaccurate narratives of progress which have cast many as fools, and many as villains. They come out with a throughline that connects the 'ancient primitive' with 'ancient futures'.